Читать книгу Beckett’s Late Stage - Rhys Tranter - Страница 7

what is the word

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection.

Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle1

In the Spring of 2017, I was fortunate enough to direct a production of Footfalls. My cast were both highly experienced, but were performing Beckett for the first time. From the first read-through, two persistent questions arose: What is wrong with May? and What has happened to her? These questions arose repeatedly during the question and answer sessions with the audiences after each performance. These are possibly inevitable questions from both the actors’ and audience’s perspectives. For the former, the best practice of creating a credible character in a theatrical context might seem to demand some form of knowledge of the character’s history and, hence, her motivation; or, if not knowledge, then at least some form of working hypothesis. For the latter, the desire to diagnose May’s condition is, of course, a desire to know what has been witnessed. The audience knows what it has seen and heard—a woman pacing, responding to an off-stage voice, and then creating a narrative ‘sequel’—and yet seeing and hearing are not felt to be enough and the desire to know what has been witnessed leads to a diagnostic drive. If only, the thought goes, we could come to understand what is wrong with her. If only, we were told what the ‘it all’ is that May keeps revolving in her poor mind.

This diagnostic drive is not to be condemned (after all, much academic work has sought to do the same thing for May, or Mouth, for example) but perhaps should be seen as an inevitable consequence of Beckett’s work. That he was alive to such possibilities is evident long before he turned to the stage. Indeed, Watt could be seen as demonstrating, and possibly undermining, just such a diagnostic drive. When the Galls come to tune the piano, Watt cannot say ‘Yes, I remember, that is what happened then’ (W, 61), leaving the incident of the Galls as one of an interplay of its formal facets alone: ‘a mere example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment’ (W, 60). Watt has not ‘executed an interpretation since the age of fourteen, or fifteen,’ so he find this need to know beyond the ‘face values’ deeply upsetting, as many an audience member faced with a late Beckett play might also feel. Indeed, ‘light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound’ might serve as a fair description of Beckett’s later work for the theatre in which such formal features fail to provide access to a deeper understanding that an audience might expect and seek. This is not to say that Beckett’s theatre fails to provide such an understanding; rather it invites the attempt to know, to diagnose, and thus focuses the audience’s attention on the processes of bearing witness, endlessly.

The plight of Watt trying to come to terms with the Galls, father and son, is but one of example in the novel of what Arsene describes as ‘the unutterable, the ineffable’ that demands failing attempts to utter it, to eff it (W, 52). ‘To eff’ is of course a non-existent word, despite the fact that it should, logically, be available within the language, as the word’s journey from Latin to English has retained the negative form whilst disposing of the positive, effabilis. It seems as if Beckett makes an appeal within the logic of language to that which is not available within that language. In so doing, Beckett can not describe but only circumscribe a site of emergence. According to this logic, only a successful identification and description of the ineffable would arrest the economy of emergence. This is once again a facet of the diagnostic drive that audience and actors so often feel when encountering Beckett’s work, and upon which the academic community might be said to depend.

In the present work, Rhys Tranter has circumscribed this area of emergence as that of trauma. By definition, Tranter suggests, trauma is precisely that which cannot be identified as such in Beckett’s work: it is always, as it were, off stage or unsaid. If one were to identify the trauma, it could then be successfully ‘disposed of,’ as Freud put it. For Freud, coming to terms—and the word is loaded—is a question of mastery. The traumatized patient repeatedly suffers because there ‘is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can be disposed of.’ (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 30) The therapeutic project would be to ensure just this mastery through the identification of the traumatic episode itself. If we transpose Freud’s description into the field of literary criticism, and in particular Beckett criticism, then immediately a number of concerns become apparent. Firstly, there is a danger that we as critics wish to assume a mastery over texts that repeatedly disavow such mastery. Secondly, the act of ‘binding’ these texts—thereby giving them a coherence around a single focal point or related points—begs the question whether they can then be disposed of, thus silencing both those texts and future critical works. This means that care needs to be taken with whatever critical tools we bring to bear on the works, be it archival, historical or more philosophical and speculative; a care that recognises that we as critics are part of the same economy of emergence and repetition as the texts themselves.

Throughout this book, Tranter stresses that the status of ‘late,’ with all its connotations and complications, should be borne in mind. There might seem to be no more ‘late’ text than what is the word, the final written work, which, according to Van Hulle, was to be Beckett’s last word no matter if another were to follow:

On the first page of the manuscript of what is the word, [Beckett] added in the top margin ‘Keep! for end’, indicating that no matter how much longer he might live and whatever he might still write, the final word had to be this acknowledgement that he could not find the word. (C, xvi)

So, the last word was to be what is the word no matter if it was in fact the last word and, if van Hulle is correct, it was to be delayed in order for it to be the last word. Fittingly, the English translation appeared in print once Beckett was himself ‘late’ as it only appeared posthumously. Perhaps no less fittingly, there is some doubt about what what is the word is; poem or prose? Van Hulle includes it in his Faber edited collection of late prose. Lawlor and Pilling also include it in The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett. Calder, who was the first to print the piece within a book, included it as prose in the volume As the Story was Told2, although he describes it as Beckett’s last ‘literary utterance’ to avoid the issue of genre (10). (As an aside, in both van Hulle’s collection and The Collected Poems, what is the word is not given the position of the last word at all, as both volumes provide further texts as appendices.)

Whatever its generic status, what is the word exhibits the same ambiguous relation to the diagnostic drive as the incident of Watt and the Galls. Although not written as a question, the title seems to create a series of hesitant responses that approach the word that lies ineffably out of reach. The responses undergo a process of weakening as verbs are lessened in their force or hedged about with caveats. So, ‘see’ becomes ‘glimpse’ which is in turn is weakened into ‘seem to glimpse’ and then further into ‘need to seem to glimpse’. Similarly, the identification of a site ‘there’ is weakened to the point where it becomes ‘afaint afar away over there’(C, 134). As the words pile up, the object of their search recedes still further away, yet those words have been generated precisely in this need to search for the word at last. Even if we posit that ‘what’ is the word that was searched for all along (thus making ‘what is the word’ a statement rather than reading it as a question) the answer would only beg a series of further questions: what does what signify? A condition of ‘whatness’ perhaps? And what might that mean?

One aspect in what is the word that does not suffer this process of lessening is the word ‘folly’. From the outset, ‘folly’ predicates all the various attempts towards naming the word, so, by the end, the text reads:

folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –

what –

what is the word—

what is the word

(C, 134-5)

Folly might not be the word, but it is no less a crucial one. Awareness of one’s own foolishness in searching does not stop one searching; after all, we ‘need to seem to glimpse’ what is just ‘over there.’ But such an awareness mitigates against any notion of mastery as we are engaging in an inevitable yet mistaken enterprise from the very beginning. Instead of mastery, there are the steady accretions of language and those accretions might give us access to not folly, but, from the Old French, folie or ‘delight’.

Paul Stewart

November 2017

1 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII, trans. James Strachey et. al. (London: Vintage, 2001)

2 As The Story was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: Calder, 1990)